ESI is a powerful tool that can be used to identify priorities; a state might be facing several environmental changes such as water pollution, air pollution and loss of forest and biodiversity. Using ESI it can be determined which of these issues needs the most urgent attention. It can be effectively used to formulate targeted policies and to allocate funds more rationally, within states and within sectors. Governments can benchmark their performance to peer states: Tamil Nadu can compare itself with Kerala, for example or with the best performing state to identify what are the historical and man-made factors that have created the difference in ranking and how best it can be changed. Each state has something to learn from others. The ESI also collects and collates a huge amount of data and converts into interpretable indices, to create more awareness of environmental sustainability among the practitioners, researchers and society as a whole.

Values farther from the center indicates better performance; Values are calibrated in a scale of 0 (worst) to 100 (best). More the area occupied by the chart in the spider indicates better performance by the state in all components.

Values are in a scale of -3 (worst) to +3 (best) and 0 means average. The bars going upwards shows better than average (of all 28 states) performance and the bars going downwards shows less than the average (of all 28 states).More number of longer upward bars is desirable and indicates good performances.